Some seriously bigoted students at Towson University have formed
a ‘White Student Union’ to save the campus from the threat of...black
people. Led by a flaming racist who complained “Why can’t we just have
segregation?” at CPAC, the White Student Union is being especially
dillgent to protect (with force) pure white female bodies from the
not-so-looming threat of Black rape. It’s like they watched the Birth of the Nation and thought it was a PBS documentary.

The
frequent robberies, sexual assaults, and acts of vandalism at Towson
University are not often reported in the local media. For those who are
not Towson students it seems hard to fathom that every single day black
predators prey upon the majority white Towson University student body.
White Southern men have long been called to defend their communities
when law enforcement and the State seem unwilling to protect our people.

The
virtue of white Christian womanhood is under attack at Towson
University by degenerate criminals seeking to rob our women of their God
given innocence. Through armed thuggery the money of law abiding Towson
students that is earned by the sweat of their brow is stolen and their
lives threatened for simply walking down the street.

White
Student Union member Scott Terry thinks Black people belong under
threat of the white man’s gun, which he shoots at ranges with his fellow
White Student Union racists. At CPAC, where the group first made
headlines, Terrry mocked Frederick Douglass for 'forgiving' his former slave owner, asking “For what? For feeding him and housing him?"

His unapologetic displays of hate include his admission that he’d " be fine"
if black people were subservient to whites, because he believes white
people are "systematically disenfranchised" by the law. He said, "The
white, blue-collar vote is being completely ignored by Republicans." We
all know how much the GOP loves people of color.

White House says US will not be intimidated by 'bellicose rhetoric' and is fully capable of defending itself and its allies

The White House warned North Korea
on Friday that the rapidly escalating military confrontation would lead
to further isolation, as the Pentagon declared that the US was fully
capable of defending itself and its allies against a missile attack.

After
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un declared that rockets were ready to be
fired at American bases in the Pacific – a response to the US flying two
nuclear-capable B2 stealth bombers over the Korean peninsula this week –
the White House blamed Pyongyang for the increased tensions.

"The bellicose rhetoric emanating from North Korea only deepens that nation's isolation. The United States
remains committed to safeguarding our allies in the region and our
interests that are located there," deputy press spokesman Josh Earnest
told reporters travelling with Barack Obama on Air Force One to Miami.Asked
if the joint US-South Korean military exercises and the use of the
stealth bombers had fuelled the escalation, Earnest replied: "It's clear
that the escalation is taking place from the North Koreans based on
their rhetoric and on their actions."

The Pentagon said on Friday
that the US would not be intimidated, and was ready to defend both its
bases and its allies in the region. Lt Col Catherine Wilkinson, a
Pentagon spokesperson, said the US would not be intimidated. "The United
States is fully capable of defending itself and our allies against a
North Korean attack. We are firmly committed to the defence of South Korea and Japan," she said.

Secretary of state John Kerry will visit the region in a week or so for meetings with Japan, China and South Korea, the State Department said.

I just watched Red Dawn: The Remake. Really pretty unreal action
movie, escapist fair. Except the North Koreans have declared a state of
war with South Korea.Outside of perhaps
Iran is there any other country on the planet less likely rouse sympathy
from anyone in the US, with the possible exception of the RCP?I mean really?

The Obama administration
is to review the safety of 20 flame retardants used in a host of common
household items, from baby products and children's pyjamas to sofa
cushions.

The review, to be carried out by the Environmental
Protection Agency, follows growing concern about the widespread use of
such chemicals, after studies linking flame retardants to cancer, lower
IQ, developmental problems, and decreased fertility.

"Americans
are often exposed to flame retardant chemicals in their daily lives,"
the EPA said in its announcement of the risk assessment. "EPA is
committed to more fully understanding the potential risks of flame
retardant chemicals, taking action if warranted, and identifying safer
substitutes when possible."

Eleven states are considering laws to
ban toxic flame retardants, in response to hundreds of studies over the
last four decades pointing to the health and environmental dangers.

The
chemicals migrate out of household products, and are inhaled as dust,
or ingested by young children who put things in their mouths.

They also linger in the environment turning up in the tissue of baby seals and other marine animals.

Campaigners
said the announcement by the EPA was an important first step
controlling chemicals that have become extraordinarily widespread,
despite the dangers.

The Centres for Disease Control recently
detected flame retardants in the blood or urine of virtually every
person tested for the substances. A study published last month found
elevated cancer risks among firefighters exposed to high levels of flame
retardants during house fires.

"It's wonderful progress, but it's
not over," said Susan Shaw, director of the Marine Environmental
Research Institute, who led the study on the California firefighters.

Emails reveal close collaboration between Regnerus and Witherspoon Institute

For
social conservatives, it was a watershed moment. Faced with declining
public support, they had long sought for science to confirm that
same-sex households are not a suitable family arrangement. With his New
Family Structures Study (NFSS), released last year, UT associate
professor of sociology Mark Regnerus seemed to make the case with
a clarion blast. According to his research, children raised in same-sex
homes fared worse than those raised by opposite-sex parents – showing a
higher propensity for drug and tobacco use, alcohol abuse, depression,
and thoughts of suicide. With scholarship backing the right's message,
it was not difficult to get the media to listen.

But LGBT advocacy
groups were listening, too. After the reporting of the NFSS results,
several were quick to highlight problems in the research – arguing that
the study was not adequately peer-reviewed, and, importantly, that it
had much less to say about "same-sex" relationships than about unstable
marriages; as Amy Davidson summarized in a blog post for The New Yorker: "If this study shows anything, it's not the effect of gay parenting, but of non- or absentee parenting."

Other critics pointed out that the research was funded by the socially conservative Bradley Foundation, as well as the Wither­spoon Institute. Although a subsequent University of Texas
review found no inappropriate influence, recently released documents
(in response to open-records requests by the American Indepen­dent News
Network) reflect that Witherspoon's relationship with the study was
cozier than Regnerus had let on.

In the initial NFSS report,
Regnerus insisted that Witherspoon "played no role at all in the design
or conduct of the study, the analysis, the interpretation of the data,
or in the preparation of [the] manuscript." He subsequently upped the
rhetorical ante, claiming, "I have always acted without strings from
either organization [Bradley or Wither­spoon]. Any allegations that the
funders might have improperly influenced me are simply false." However,
the emails released by UT detail a close working relationship between
Regner­us and Brad Wil­cox, Witherspoon's director of the Program on
Marriage, Family, and Democracy.

In a September 2010
correspondence with Regnerus, Wilcox relays budgetary decisions on
behalf of Witherspoon, approving several items related to the study,
including possible scholarly collaborators and the length of study
proposal. In a July 2011 email, Regnerus speaks of a joint decision to
pay an unidentified person $15,000 to "co-analyze and co-author the
report."

US supreme court observers groaned when the well-regarded and Peabody Award-winning SCOTUSblog.com put the chances of the supreme court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma) at 80%. As far as predictability goes, supreme court decisions are somewhere between
next week's weather and Tilda Swinton's career choices. Maybe,
SCOTUSblog was itself playing at a little performance art, a commentary
on the search for specificity and certainty in a series of cases that
deal primarily with the ineffable realm of human emotions. Love, to be
sure, but also the fear and unease, if not outright bigotry, that love
flies in the face of.

It's a sign of progress, perhaps, that that
defenders of Proposition 8 and Doma would just as soon pretend that
emotions have nothing to do with their arguments. In some darker age,
they might have been able to build a case that the "love" was, in fact,
the thing that distinguished a heterosexual relationship from a
homosexual one. That darker age was, of course, last year, when Protect
Marriage Maine campaigned against that state's referendum to allow same-sex marriage with a statement that included the assertion:

"The basis of homosexuality centers around anonymous sexual encounters … it is largely predatory."

Protect Marriage Maine
scrubbed its site of that statement fairly quickly. In general,
defenders of "traditional marriage" have learned to couch their
arguments with increasing circumspection when it comes to outright
judgments of morality. This has led, ironically, to a crude emphasis on
the corporal: the central, almost only, basis for defending Proposition 8
lay in heterosexual couples being baby-makers – or, in the words of
lawyer for the defense Charles Cooper:

"The state's
interest and society's interest in what we have framed as responsible
procreation is – is vital, but at bottom, with respect to those
interests, our submission is that same-sex couples and opposite-sex
couples are simply not similarly situated."

Let it be
known for evermore that it was the defenders of traditional values that
forced the highest court in the land to ponder just how it is that
"with respect to procreation" – "at bottom", no less – same-sex and
opposite-sex couples are "not similarly situated". Do I need to draw you
a map?

Both sides of the marriage fight were presented on a national stage this week. It wasn't even close

By Irin CarmonThursday, Mar 28, 2013
It didn’t take long for the empty truth about the discriminatory Defense
of Marriage Act to be exposed Wednesday, and there was little equality
opponents could do. At the Supreme Court hearing, Elena Kagan, the
newest justice, read from the House Report from Congress when it passed
the law in 1996, which summarized DOMA’s entire legal underpinning:
“Congress decided to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment and
to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.” According to people in
the room, there were gasps and laughter at the so-called “gotcha
moment.”

It was a duh moment, but a necessary one. Yes,
DOMA’s about discrimination. That disapproval of gay people, not
tradition or government uniformity, is at the root of the act is
blatantly obvious both to anyone who observed it at the time and to
everyone who has changed
their Facebook profile photo this week. But it needed to be set out on a
national stage, a few feet away from rainbow-festooned children asking
what the big deal was. This week, both sides put forward their best
cases and it quickly became clear the opposition to equality is based
not on law or reason, but bigotry.

Throughout the hearing, the
justices focused on issues of standing and administrative law and
federalism, apparently looking for a way out. But whether the Court
punts or not, it’s already given the country an opportunity to see just
how empty and discriminatory the case against marriage equality is, at a
moment where opponents have to give it their best shot. Put aside all
the diversionary tactics, the crazy theories about marriage being reserved for shotgun weddings for
straights, the baseless claim that this is about the children. Even if
it’s not in the briefs, their argument boils down to this: Gay people
are gross, let’s put off anything suggesting otherwise for as long as we
can.

Paul Clement, who was appointed by the House to defend the
law President Obama won’t, responded to Kagan, “Sure, the House Report
says some things that we are not — we’ve never invoked in trying to
defend the statute.” In other words, Clement and the House saw no
purchase in trying to defend the, well, original intent of the law.

Marriage
equality opponents claimed that with DOMA, the federal government was
just trying to set a uniform standard while the states did their thing,
and that this was about the democratic process. But as Solicitor General
Donald Verrilli pointed out, “There are no genuine administrative
benefits to DOMA. If anything, Section 3 of DOMA makes federal
administration more difficult,” because of a patchwork of state laws. He
added, “And the fundamental reality of it is, and I think the House
report makes this glaringly clear, is that DOMA was not enacted for any
purpose of uniformity, administration, caution, pausing, any of that.”

When
Max was just a few months old, I sat cross-legged on the floor with him
in a circle of other mothers. The facilitator for our “Mommy and Me”
playgroup would throw a question out to the group, and we would each
volley back an answer.

“What quality do you want to instill in
your child? What personality characteristic would you most like
for your son to be known for?” she asked.

One by one, the mothers answered. “Athletic”, “Good sense of humor”, “Brave”, “Smart”, “Strong”.The
answers blended together until it was my turn to speak. I looked down
at the tiny human wiggling around on the blanket in front of me, his
perfectly round nose, his full lips that mirrored mine. I stroked the
top of his very bald head, and said with confidence: “kind”.

I want my son to grow up to be kind.

The
eyes of the other mothers turned toward me. “That’s not always a word
that you hear used for boys” one said. “But yes, you’re right … so I
guess, me too”. At the end of the day, we wanted our tiny, fragile,
helpless baby boys to grow up to be kind. Strong, resilient, athletic,
funny … but above all else, kind.Max is almost 4 years old. He
knows nothing about the horrific things that young men did to a young
woman on the saddest night that Steubenville, Ohio, has ever seen. He
doesn’t know, but I sure do. I know that someone’s daughter was
violated in the most violent way possible, by someone’s son. By many
sons. The blame for that night falls squarely on the shoulders of the
young men who made terrible choices, but it also falls in the laps of
their parents.

Sexual assault is about power and control. But it
is also about so much more. While it’s true that big scary monster men
sometimes jump out of bushes to rape unsuspecting women, most rapists
look like the men we see every day. Acquaintance rape (or date rape)
accounts for the majority of sexual assaults among young people: in
colleges, in high schools, at parties, in the cars and bedrooms that
belong to the men who women trust. These men are your fraternity
brothers, your athletes, your church-going friends. They are somebody’s
son.

While Wall Street crooks walk, thousands sit in California prisons for life over crimes as trivial as stealing socks

n
July 15th, 1995, in the quiet Southern California city of Whittier, a
33-year-old black man named Curtis Wilkerson got up from a booth at
McDonald's, walked into a nearby mall and, within the space of two
hours, turned himself into the unluckiest man on Earth. "I was supposed
to be waiting there while my girlfriend was at the beauty salon," he
says.

So he waited. And waited. After a while, he paged her. "She was
like, 'I need another hour,'" he says. "So I was like, 'Baby, I'm going
to the mall.'"

Having grown up with no father and a mother hooked
on barbiturates, Wilkerson, who says he still boasts a Reggie Miller
jumper, began to spend more time on the streets. After his mother died
when he was 16, he fell in with a bad crowd, and in 1981 he served as a
lookout in a series of robberies. He was quickly caught and sentenced to
six years in prison. After he got out, he found work as a forklift
operator, and distanced himself from his old life.

But that day in
the mall, something came over him. He wandered from store to store,
bought a few things, still shaking his head about his girlfriend's hair
appointment. After a while, he drifted into a department store called
Mervyn's. Your typical chain store, full of mannequins and dress racks;
they're out of business today. Suddenly, a pair of socks caught his eye.
He grabbed them and slipped them into a shopping bag.

What kind of socks were they, that they were worth taking the risk?

"They
were million-dollar socks with gold on 'em," he says now, laughing
almost uncontrollably, as he tells the story 18 years later, from a
telephone in a correctional facility in Soledad, California.

Really, they were that special?

"No, they were ordinary white socks," he says, not knowing whether to laugh or cry. "Didn't even have any stripes."

Attendees
at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) were
reportedly thrilled by a short sci-fi video depicting a dictatorial
near-future government and the underground "Movement on Fire" that
springs up to resist it. The video, a thinly veiled advertisement for
violent insurrection from the “Tea Party Patriots" group, boasts
professional acting and Hollywood production values. But underneath its
bright, professional sheen lurk dark overtones of End Times paranoia
that will resonate with millions of American fundamentalists. Its
apocalyptic imagery is as ancient as Revelations, its glossy look as
modern as a Revlon ad, and its near-subliminal barrage of rapid-cut
imagery rings with the terror-fueled sermons of 1,000 preachers.

WASHINGTON
-- The departure of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson
(D-S.D.) has left a vacancy atop the powerful panel that could fall to
one of Wall Street's most outspoken foes, a possibility that has bank lobbyists fretting.Sen.
Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), whose call to break up and cap the size of
major banks has spooked Wall Street, is behind three senators who would
have dibs on the gavel, but all three are likely to bypass the
opportunity. A Brown chairmanship would also be a boost to his ally Sen.
Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), strengthening her hand on the panel.
Brown's office didn't immediately return a request for comment.Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) is first in line, but is widely expected to take the Armed Services chairmanship instead. A West Point graduate,
Reed has a passion for Pentagon issues, and the plum chairmanship will
open in 2015 thanks to the retirement of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.).

Next
in line is Sen. Chuck Schumer. The fate of the chairmanship hinges on
the decision of the New York senator, known to some as "Wall Street
Chuck." Seizing the gavel could undermine Schumer's ability to
ultimately ascend to majority leader by alienating the growing
progressive wing in the Democratic caucus. Passing the opportunity to
Brown, on the other hand, could win him friends for a future bid. "It is
possible. All up to Schumer," one senior Senate Democratic aide said on
background, when asked about the possibility of Brown taking over.

by Ralph NaderPublished on Thursday, March 28, 2013 by Common DreamsMany giant profitable U.S. corporations are increasingly abandoning America while draining it at the same time.

General
Electric, for example, has paid no federal income taxes for a decade
while becoming a net job exporter and fighting its hard-pressed workers
who want collective bargaining through unions like the United Electrical
Workers Union (UE). GE’s boss, Jeffrey Immelt, makes about $12,400 an
hour on an 8-hour day, plus benefits and perks, presiding over this
global corporate empire.

Telling by their behavior, these big
companies think patriotism toward the country where they were created
and prospered is for chumps. Their antennae point to places where taxes
are very low, labor is wage slavery, independent unions are
non-existent, governments have their hands out, and equal justice under
the rule of law does not exist. China, for example, has fit that
description for over 25 years.

Other than profiteering from
selling Washington very expensive weapons of mass destruction, many
multinational firms have little sense of true national security.

Did
you know that about 80 percent of the ingredients in medicines
Americans take now come from China and India where visits by FDA
inspectors are infrequent and inadequate?

The lucrative U.S. drug
industry – coddled with tax credits, free transfer of
almost-ready-to-market drugs developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars via
the National Institutes of Health – charges Americans the highest prices
for drugs in the world and still wants more profits. Drug companies no
longer produce many necessary medicines like penicillin in the U.S.,
preferring to pay slave wages abroad to import drugs back into the U.S.Absence
of patriotism has exposed our country to dependency on foreign
suppliers for crucial medicines, and these foreign suppliers may not be
so friendly in the future.

Davis-Cohen's reading of the Supreme Court hearing of arguments in Bowman v. Monsanto
suggests that the essential philosophical, ethical and moral questions
underlying the case were not and will not be addressed by the court.

Self-replication
is a requirement for the continuation of life itself. When species
participate in the replication of other species - when we plant our
favorite tomato, when a butterfly pollinates its favorite flower - it is
said that they co-evolve. This power to co-evolve and self-replicate is
inherent, yet we find ourselves with our backs against the wall,
fighting to retain it. In Bowman v. Monsanto, the US Supreme Court will soon decide who has rights to Genetically Modified (GM) seeds' power to self-replicate.

On
February 19, 2013, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether patent
law extends to the offspring of GM seed and self-replicating
"technologies." The case involves Monsanto, a corporation that
genetically modifies plant genes, patents those genes and then sells GM
seed and the pesticides the seed has been genetically modified to resist
to farmers, versus a farmer, Hugh Bowman, who planted descendants of
Monsanto seed without the corporation's permission. Monsanto, whose
former vice president Michael Taylor is the deputy commissioner for
foods at the Food and Drug Administration, argued that its patent on the
GM genes within the original seed was violated when Bowman planted and
replicated the progeny of that seed. Bowman argued that those who
purchase seed not only have a right to the crop from the original seed
but also that crop's ability to self-replicate.

The case has
gained attention not only because of the implications for
self-replicating technologies but also because of the philosophical
questions attached. Computer software can self-replicate. GM genes,
through their living host, can self-replicate. Plants self-replicate.
But where does life end and technology begin? When does a GM species
have rights; when is it property? And what rights do species that
co-evolved with previously unmodified species have, if any? When is
something an autonomous creature, free to self-replicate, and when is it
a technology whose self-replicates can be patented and owned by
another?

Addressing Marc Walters, Bowman's attorney, Justice
Stephen G. Breyer set the tone of the oral argument: "I'll give you two
[things] that you can't do [with the patented seeds]. One, you can't
pick up those seeds that you've just bought and throw them in a child's
face. You can't do that because there's a law that says you can't do it.
Now, there's another law that says you cannot make copies of a patented
invention." Farmers that buy Monsanto seed, Justice Breyer argued, only
have rights to the crop of the original seed, but these rights are
limited in that they do not include the right to plant that second
generation to make a third.Monsanto owns generation 1, which it
sells to a farmer to plant. The farmer owns generation 2 and reaps the
rewards or shortcomings of the crop. But who owns generation 3?

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Twenty
years ago this July, I went to Hawaii to cover the lawsuit that
launched the first salvo in the current war over marriage equality,
ultimately leading to the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Proposition 8
and, this week, arguments before the Supreme Court: Several gay and
lesbian couples took the then-extraordinary step of suing the state of Hawaii,
claiming gender discrimination because they were denied marriage
licenses. The case crashed like a tsunami across the mainland. Anti-gay
zealots rode the wave of homophobia while gay advocates in Washington
gasped for air, drowning in anxiety.

The article I wrote, which appeared in the December 1993 issue of Out,
focused on Hawaii's history, politics and culture and how it had
ultimately led to that moment, as well as on the strains that the
couples' actions caused among gay activists on the mainland.
Incidentally, four out-of-context sentences from my 11,000-word article
have been used by anti-gay crusaders to attack gay marriage over and
over again for two decades and were even read just this past fall on the
floor of the Colombian Senate by an anti-gay politician when that
country debated same-sex marriage.

More on that deceptive,
pathetic action by the anti-gay crusaders later. What I want to say
first is that the path to the Supreme Court by gay marriage advocates is
a lesson for every movement. What took the LGBT rights movement to this
moment, and indeed what has taken us to moments of truth and potential
victory more often than not, are those who went against the established
leaders and groups and ultimately pushed an agenda from the grassroots.

The
couples in Hawaii in the early '90s, who ultimately received the
support of LGBT people across the U.S., did something that had the major
gay groups in Washington of the time up in arms. The groups were
focused on making incremental change, mostly on getting a hate crimes
bill and a watered-down employment nondiscrimination bill passed as the
first major pieces of legislation to protect gay people. (That
employment bill, now the Employment Non-Discrimination Act [ENDA], still
has not passed). The idea of fighting for marriage seemed just crazy
and, to them, bound to cause a backlash that would distract them and
immerse them in something they didn't plan on.

(WOMENSENEWS)--Throughout U.S. history, "states' rights" was a convenient code for racism.Conservative
politicians railed that legal changes in favor of African Americans
were a violation of "states' rights." Southerners especially contended
that their state legislatures had a right to laws that discriminated
against people born with the wrong skin color.

Yet rarely is the
phrase states' rights seen also as a code to legitimize the violation of
women's rights, even though every woman gains or loses the right to
make decisions about her own body when she crosses state lines.

Just
last week, North Dakota lawmakers banned the termination of pregnancies
that are beyond six weeks--when a woman barely knows whether or not she
has missed her period.

Because men cannot get pregnant, such laws
do not apply to them, and the conflict between women's rights and
states' rights continues.

The legal point should have been
resolved by the 14th and 15th Amendments in the 1860s, but a century
passed before the majority of Americans agreed that the federal
government should overrule racially discriminatory state laws. A hundred
years after the Civil War ended in 1865, nonwhites finally saw the
promise of true liberty with the passage of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

While
almost everyone today sees states' rights as an antiqued philosophy,
astonishingly few see that it also is key to understanding women's
rights. Historians don't teach it that way, and so this vast aspect of
U.S. history goes unacknowledged.

From the nation's beginning,
though, statehood meant a step backwards for most women. In the colonial
era of the 1600s, women freely went to court and argued their own
cases. But under new state governments, many women lost their right to
sue.

Boston College administrators are threatening to bring disciplinary action against a group called BC Students for Sexual Health
over their insistence upon giving away free condoms and sexual health
information, saying the practice violates the school’s Catholic values.

Students
received a letter on March 15 from the college’s dean of students and
director of residence life ordering them to stop their so-called “safe
sites” program run where male and female condoms are distributed for
free, according to The Boston Globe.

The
letter explained that while the administration realizes the students
“may not be intentionally violating university policy, we do need to
advise you that should we ­receive any reports that you are, in fact,
distributing condoms on campus, the matter would be referred to the
student conduct office for disciplinary action by the university.”

When women like Adria Richards speak out against sexism and misogyny, they're met with rape threats and/or fired

The Adria Richards story isn't a new one: Woman publicly says something about sexism.
The internet hordes descend. Woman is on the receiving end of rape and
death threats. Woman disappears for a while, sometimes forever.
Commentators who believe themselves to be "reasonable" pontificate on
everything woman could have done differently to avoid such a fate, and
suggest that women who object to sexism or sexualized workplaces just
need to have a sense of humor. Or be less difficult. Or ask politely for
change. Or don't get so hysterical. Or be less sensitive because the
internet is a mean place, and rape threats are just words.

The details of the latest incarnation of this story involve Adria Richards, a developer evangelist for the company SendGrid. Adria went to the PyCon conference
last weekend, and during a talk overheard two men sitting behind her
making dumb sexual jokes about dongles and forking. She turned around
and took their picture, then posted it on Twitter along with a basic summary of what they said. PyCon conference organizers intervened and said the situation was "dealt with".

Unfortunately,
it didn't end there. One of the jokesters was fired from his job. The
other, who worked at the same company, was not. Angry about this
apparent travesty, internet harassers came out in full force. Richards' own site
and that of her employer, SendGrid, were subject to denial-of-service
attacks. Richards was personally bombarded with rape and murder threats.
Someone sent her a photo of a naked, decapitated bound woman's body with the caption "When I'm done." A concerted effort
began on 4chan to get Richards fired. Instead of standing up for an
employee in the face of rape and death threats, SendGrid caved. It fired
Richards because, in short, she was a trouble-maker.

Of course it's possible to disagree with Richards' actions
while still focusing on the real problem: misogyny online and in tech
spaces. But it's really not possible to pontificate at length on what
Richards should have done without obscuring the fact that when women
speak out, we're met with rape threats.

Lauren McCauley, staff writerPublished on Monday, March 25, 2013 by Common Dreams

As
the Eastern Seaboard of the United States bears the brunt of yet
another late season snow storm, a growing body of research proves that
the record decline in Arctic sea ice has played a "critical role" in the large and southerly snowfalls of recent years.

Satellite images
published Monday by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in
Boulder, Colorado, confirm that the ice extent is close to the minimum
ever recorded for this time of year."The sea ice is going rapidly. It's 80% less than it was just 30 years ago," said Jennifer Francis of the Rutgers Institute of Coastal and Marine Science. "There has been a dramatic loss."

She
goes on to explain that the rapid decline in sea ice is what is
affecting the jet stream and leading to the extreme weather currently
being experienced in the mid-latitudes.

"It allows the cold air
from the Arctic to plunge much further south. The pattern can be slow to
change because the [southern] wave of the jet stream is getting bigger.
It's now at a near record position, so whatever weather you have now is
going to stick around."

Adding to her assertion, in a report published earlier this month in the Proceedings in the National Academy of Scientists,
researchers confirm that global-warming induced sea ice loss is causing
changes in the "winter Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation,"
including the jet stream, which allows cold Arctic air to reach further
south and causes "more frequent episodes of blocking patterns that lead
to increased cold surges over large parts of northern continents."

“Monsanto
is an agricultural company. We apply innovation and technology to help
farmers around the world produce more while conserving more.”

“Producing more, Conserving more, Improving farmers lives.”

These
are the promises Monsanto India’s website makes, alongside pictures of
smiling, prosperous farmers from the state of Maharashtra. This is a
desperate attempt by Monsanto and its PR machinery to delink the
epidemic of farmers’ suicides in India from the company’s growing
control over cotton seed supply — 95 per cent of India’s cotton seed is
now controlled by Monsanto.

Control over seed is the first link in
the food chain because seed is the source of life. When a corporation
controls seed, it controls life, especially the life of farmers.

Monsanto’s
concentrated control over the seed sector in India as well as across
the world is very worrying. This is what connects farmers’ suicides in
India to Monsanto vs Percy Schmeiser in Canada, to Monsanto vs Bowman in
the US, and to farmers in Brazil suing Monsanto for $2.2 billion for
unfair collection of royalty.Through patents on seed, Monsanto
has become the “Life Lord” of our planet, collecting rents for life’s
renewal from farmers, the original breeders.

Patents on seed are
illegitimate because putting a toxic gene into a plant cell is not
“creating” or “inventing” a plant. These are seeds of deception — the
deception that Monsanto is the creator of seeds and life; the deception
that while Monsanto sues farmers and traps them in debt, it pretends to
be working for farmers’ welfare, and the deception that GMOs feed the
world. GMOs are failing to control pests and weeds, and have instead led
to the emergence of superpests and superweeds.

Communities
working to stop a controversial gas drilling process are getting what
sounds like encouragement from an unlikely source: a report prepared for
the oil and gas industry on the risks posed by those communities
themselves. Even more bizarre than a risk assessment about grassroots
activists is one that basically admits the activists are right.

Control Risks, the global risk and strategic consulting
firm that conducted the report, calls itself “independent,” but it
makes its alliances clear in the first few sentences. Hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, could bring “a golden age of cheap, plentiful
energy for a resource-constrained world,” writes senior global issues
analyst Jonathan Wood, “but only if it makes it out of the ground.”

Entitled “The Global Anti-Fracking Movement: What It Wants, How It Operates, and What’s Next,” the 2012 report
uses the term “battlegrounds” to describe more than thirty countries on
six continents where the issue of fracking is being debated. Its
warnings about the dangers of ignoring the anti-fracking movement were
likely a motivator behind last week’s so-called truce
between four gas companies and a handful of environmental groups in the
Appalachian Basin. Shell, Chevron, CONSOL Energy, and EQT Corporation
joined with the Environmental Defense Fund, the Clean Air Task Force,
and a few others to form the Center for Sustainable Shale Development.
The Center will monitor the 15 environmental standards for fracking
agreed upon by the alliance and will certify drilling operations that
voluntarily comply with the standards.

Although the report is
intended to provide gas companies with a plan for squashing the
anti-fracking movement, people concerned about the environment or public
health will find it worth reading for at least three reasons (besides
entertainment). It contains reams of hard data about the movement, it
identifies the tactics that have been most successful so far, and it
ultimately backs up many of the movement’s key arguments.

The
report assembles a wealth of information about fracking and the movement
against it. It begins with a world map in which shale gas reserves are
colored blue. This reveals huge stores of gas buried beneath areas such
as Tibet, southern Brazil, Libya, and almost the entirety of South
Africa. Just a glance gives a global perspective on what the
anti-fracking movement is really up against.

"And
you can play with that metaphor," Kennedy said, continuing that in that
consideration, "There's a wonderful destination" or "a cliff."

Prop
8 was the California ballot referendum passed in November 2008 that
banned same-sex marriage, reversing by popular vote the state Supreme
Court's decision just months earlier to recognize marriage equality.

Kennedy
seemed genuinely interested in that “wonderful destination” and
mortified by the prospect that there still might be a cliff. He
acknowledged that while the social science on gay marriage is relatively
new, there is an “immediate” legal harm to those same-sex couples who
cannot be married. He said the voice of thousands of children of
same-sex couples is an important aspect of the case.

“They want
their parents to have full recognition and legal status,” Kennedy told
Charles J. Cooper, who is representing supporters of Prop 8’s ban on gay
marriage. “The voice of those children is considerable in this case,
don’t you think?”

Kennedy also expressed deep doubts that Prop 8,
and same-sex marriage bans in general, present "no harm of denigration"
against gays and lesbians.

Before the justices even reached the
merits of the constitutional case for same-sex marriage, Chief Justice
John Roberts instructed both advocates to argue whether the parties
defending Prop 8 had legal standing.

The shockingly rapid and radical collapse of the anti-gay framework demonstrates the baselessness of defeatism

The US Supreme Court this morning is hearing oral argument
in two cases challenging the constitutionality of laws that
discriminate against same-sex couples. It is expected that the Court
will at least strike down the Defense of Marriage Act, as multiple lower
courts have done, on the ground that it denies equal government
benefits to same-sex couples (such as immigration rights). Over the past
two weeks, numerous national Democratic politicians, led by Hillary Clinton and joined by other centrist to conservative senators, announced that they have changed their minds
and now support marriage equality, a move tellingly perceived as an
attempt to get on "the right side of history". All of that was preceded
by a reliably right-wing GOP Senator, Rob Portman, doing the same by citing his gay son. Marriage equality is a position the US president and his party formally endorse, and polls continue to show dramatic increases in public support to the point where it is now a position affirmed by a large majority of Americans. It's conventional wisdom that national gay marriage is inevitable; the tipping point has clearly been reached.

It really is a bit shocking how quickly gay marriage transformed from being a fringe, politically toxic position
just a few years ago to a virtual piety that must be affirmed in decent
company. Whenever I write or speak about any of the issues on which I
focus, I always emphasize that a posture of defeatism - which is a form
of learned impotence: a belief that meaningful change is impossible - is
misguided. This demonstrates why that is true: even the most ossified
biases and entrenched institutional injustices can be subverted - if the
necessary passion and will are summoned and the right strategies found.

I
don't want to overstate the lesson here. There are reasons why such
radical change on this issue is easier than on many others. Social
issues don't threaten entrenched ruling interests: allowing same-sex
couples to marry doesn't undermine oligarchs, the National Security
State, or the wildly unequal distribution of financial and political
power. Indeed, many of those ruling interests, led by Wall Street and other assorted plutocrats (including Obama's donor base),
became the most devoted advocates for LGBT equality. If anything, one
could say that the shift on this issue has been more
institution-affirming than institution-subverting: the campaign to
overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" continually glorified and even
fetishized military service, while gay marriage revitalizes a
traditional institution - marriage - that heterosexuals have been in the
process of killing with whimsical weddings, impetuous divorces, and
serial new spouses (as Rush Limbaugh might put it: I'd like you to meet my fourth wife).
And these changes are taking a once marginalized and culturally
independent community and fully integrating it into mainstream society,
thus making that community invested in conventional societal
institutions.

The
Supreme Court is hearing arguments about DOMA and Prop 8 today, and
there’s a lot of anticipation now, especially since they could truly use
this opportunity to not only strike down these laws but also to make
same-sex marriage a right held by all Americans. Unsurprisingly,
same-sex marriage opponents are grimly warning pro-gay people that a win
in the courts is going to backfire, an argument I find asinine on many
levels.

The long-standing opposition to abortion rights post-Roe
has nothing to do with the haste in which the Supreme Court moved to
protect women’s rights. Let’s give our opponents the dignity of assuming
they aren’t that stupid; their opposition to women’s rights is
genuine, and not a temper tantrum over process. That said, I do think
there’s a strong reason to believe that, unlike abortion, once
conservatives lose the legal battle over same-sex marriage, they’ll
probably give up, much as they did on the question of interracial
marriage.

The reason is that conservatives are obsessed with
appearances, far more than liberals, who tend to have an ideal of
reconciling reality and appearances. That’s how conservatives can
prattle about waiting for sex until marriage while 95% of
Americans—including most people engaging in the prattle—have sex before
marriage. This kind of social hypocrisy is held by both right and
left—for instance, both Democrats and Republicans use drugs while
supporting drug prohibition—but tends to be more of a thing for folks on
the right. That’s why conservatives are fond of abortion bans. Abortion
is a private medical choice, and so it’s easy enough to secretly get an
abortion while publicly denouncing abortion rights. For well-off
conservatives, abortion will always be an option, even if it’s banned,
because you can just pay a discreet doctor to do it or travel to Canada.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson